


Heart Less

by irrelevant



Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, Nakama, Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-14
Updated: 2010-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-10 13:26:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irrelevant/pseuds/irrelevant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A retelling of <i>The Snow Queen</i> with Robin as the Queen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart Less

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the op_exchange on LJ in December of '08. This is a One Piece-style retelling of The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen. No more than superficially close to the original, but then Zoro isn't HCA.

I know Uncle Bigmouth usually does this, but he and Aunt K had to go with your mom and dad to that, uh, that thing at the thing.

The dance party thing the lady Marine always does up at that... place. You know what I'm talking about. Point is, me and Target-brow are the only ones around. He's still got stuff to bake for tomorrow, so you guys are stuck with me tonight.

Hey, I know stories. Lots of stories. Maybe they're not as good as Usopp's, but…

Look, I'll make you a deal. You listen while I make an idiot of myself and I'll talk the giraffe into doing the box when he shows up, okay? Okay.

I'm, uh, not sure how I'm supposed to start. Usopp always does the song and dance, but—if you guys say so. Yeah, yeah, shut up. Talking now.

So, a long-ass time ago, or something like that, there were these two guys. They lived in a city on an island in the middle of the biggest, weirdest ocean ever, and they were—I guess you could say they were friends. Kind of.

Okay no, they weren't friends, because one guy liked prissy clothes and prissier food and all kinds of women, and the other guy liked fighting and training and all kinds of swords. Not much common ground. But the thing was, these two guys, they'd been apprenticed around the same time in the same part of town—dojo next to a restaurant—and they sort of grew up together. The prissy guy learned how to cook and swear and kick like a mule; the sword guy learned discipline and technique, and this one girl who was a hundred times better than him at everything taught him how to check his ego. And somewhere in between getting their asses kicked and kicking each other's asses, the two guys got used to each other.

Also, they kind of liked kicking each other's asses. And everybody else's.

And that was life in a city on an island in the biggest, weirdest ocean around. It was life for twelve years, and that's how it went—asses kicked or getting kicked—until suddenly, it stopped being that way because the cook stopped swearing.

That was what the swordsman picked up on first, the not-swearing. And then he noticed that the cook didn't pick fights with him anymore, the cook didn't pick fights with anyone, he didn't even yell, and that wasn't even the most fu—uh, the most messed up part. Because sometime when the swordsman wasn't looking, the hearts had disappeared.

See, the cook really liked women, remember? And not the way a guy normally likes a pretty girl, either, he just about worshipped anything with ti—uh. You know. Girl parts.

Just like Uncle Target-brow, yeah. Anyway, the cook got all stupid around girls and spilled dumb pink hearts everywhere. It's what the swordsman hated most about him. Except maybe it wasn't, because when the hearts stopped coming, the swordsman got kind of creeped out. After a week of no hearts, he said to the cook, "Oi, dumbass," and nodded towards the woman who'd just walked into the restaurant. "She's kind of hot, huh?"

The cook said, "If you say so, sir," in this blank voice. And then he went to take the lady's order like she was just any other customer.

So now the swordsman was really creeped out. Because no hearts and no swearing and no fights and the cook calling him 'Sir' and what the hell was up with all that? But he didn't have much time to worry about it because the day after the restaurant weirdness, the cook disappeared.

The swordsman wasn't around for the disappearing act. He was a busy guy and he had training and the dojo and a life, and he couldn't always hang out in a kitchen and taunt stupid cooks. It was about a week before he went back to the restaurant and by then, the cook was gone.

"Oh him?" one of the other cooks said. "I heard this foreign queen hired him as her head chef. Ask around down at the docks, they can probably tell you which ship."

"Yeah thanks, I'll do that," the swordsman said, and as it turned out, finding out what happened was easy. What happened after—that was the hard part.

"The Snow Queen," a dock worker told the swordsman. "Her ship sailed yesterday. They say she lives on an island where it's always winter, in a castle called Impel Down. The World Government sends her criminals from everywhere, and she turns them to ice. If your friend went with her, he's not coming back."

"He's not my friend," said the swordsman. "Is there some place around here I can get a boat?"

There wasn't, not that the swordsman could afford. He spent the afternoon on the wharf, going from shipyard to shipyard, and when the sun started to sink, he was still boatless. He came out of the last shipwright's office and stared at the sullen glow on the horizon. The sea looked like blood. The swordsman thought, Maybe I could swim.

And then, "How come you got three swords?" somebody said, and the swordsman looked away from the bloody ocean into a young-old face shaded by a straw hat.

"Who're you?" the swordsman said.

"I'm a pirate," said the kid in the straw hat. "I'm looking for my brother. He's got black hair like me and freckles, and a tattoo on his arm. Seen him?"

"No," said the swordsman. "I'm looking for a blond guy with a curly eyebrow. Smokes like a chimney. Seen him?"

"Nope," said the pirate. "Why's he only got one eyebrow?"

"Because his stupid hair hangs down over the other one."

"Oh," said the pirate, as though that made perfect sense. Then, "Hey, want to come with me? You can look for your eyebrow guy while I look for my brother."

"No ship," said the swordsman, but, "That's okay, I have one," said the pirate. "I've got a liar, too," he added proudly, and the swordsman didn't know what that meant but he figured he'd find out soon enough.

The pirate's ship was a run-down caravel with a sheep's head on its curved bowsprit. The liar was a long-nosed kid who wore weird goggles and told whoppers just about every time he opened his mouth.

"He didn't," the pirate told the swordsman while the liar explained how he'd built the caravel from the ground up. "His dad did, but his dad went away. That's why he's here, because he's looking for his dad. His mom died, so he's got nowhere else to go."

It made sense to the swordsman, in a weird way. Three guys looking for three other guys, and the first three guys meet up and keep on looking together. It felt right. "When do we leave?" he asked, and the pirate grinned like a lunatic and said, "Now."

None of them really knew how to navigate, so at first they just sort of went where the wind took them. Sometimes they passed other ships, pirate ships, naval ships, passenger ships with people waving and smiling from the decks. Cargo ships full to bursting. Sometimes it was weeks before the next island, the next ship. And then they got to an island full of life and people and sweet-smelling fruit trees, and they stopped.

The people were nice and the food was good. The pirate ate until he bulged and the liar talked until he was hoarse. The swordsman ate a little and drank a lot and kept an eye on everyone else, especially the redheaded girl who seemed to be in charge. The swordsman wasn't old or wise but he knew enough to recognize trouble when he saw it, and the redhead had trouble written all over her.

Later that night, the swordsman opened his eyes and watched the redhead sneak across the room they'd been given. "It's kind of late for visiting," he said, then laughed when she jumped and screeched.

Of course, she woke up the liar and the pirate, and then they all just sort of sat, or in the redhead's case stood there staring at each other.

"Sorry, wrong room!" the redhead said, and started back towards the door, but by then the swordsman was moving and he got between her and the door before she could leave.

The pirate rubbed his eyes and yawned and said, "How come you're in our room?"

The redhead said, "It's my room, this is my house," and the swordsman said, "Do you always steal from your guests?

Well, the redhead didn't like that much. She pokered up and the swordsman figured he was due for a hard right to the gut, but the pirate laughed and said, "You're a thief? That's cool!"

The liar said, "Are you crazy? She was going to rob _us_!"

The thief was staring at them like they were nuts, so the swordsman said, "That's just how they are," and grinned at her.

The thief looked at him, looked at the pirate and the liar, and then she sat down, right in the middle of the floor. The pirate said, "Hahahaha, that's not a chair."

The liar said, "We have to get out of here, she probably has snipers stationed on every rooftop, I mean I'm the best in the world but—"

"Shut up," said the pirate. He rested his elbows on his knees and cocked his head at the thief. "Why'd you want to rob us?" he asked.

The thief blinked, she swallowed, and she said, "Because a fishman took my sister. If I don't draw him a map of the world or pay him one hundred million beli by the end of next year, he'll kill her."

"You draw maps?" said the swordsman. The thief gave him a really nasty look.

"I'm the best cartographer you'll ever meet," she said.

"You're a navigator!" said the pirate. Duh, said the thief's raised eyebrow.

The pirate laughed again. "Be our navigator," he said. "We're going all the way around the world until we find my brother, his dad, and the eyebrow guy. We can find your sister, too. And when we do, we'll kick the fish guy's ass."

And that's how they finally learned to make the ship go in the direction they wanted it to go. They started running across rumors of an island where it never stopped snowing. The thief had contacts and friends on a lot of islands, and from them, the crew got a good idea of where they were headed. For a while, things went smoothly; they had great maps and a navigator who really knew her stuff, and they didn't run out of food or water anymore in between islands. But then they hit a bad run of towns where the natives weren't that friendly and they got chased off before they could re-supply. They ended up stopping on a deserted island and killing their own meat, which was fine, but the following night, the thief got sick.

Yeah, you've heard this part somewhere. That's okay. Your family's got guts—they're worth telling stories about, you know?

Okay, so where—right. Sick.

The swordsman, pirate and liar were worried. Every time the thief tried to get up—and she kept trying, she was that stubborn—she'd fall over, and one of the others would haul her back to bed. On the third day, her temperature hit one-oh-four and kept rising. She'd stopped sweating but her temperature was still going up, and that was scarier than the chills and the shakes and the fever combined.

"We have to do something," the liar said. "My mother. She was sick a long time, but one winter there was influenza in my town and, and that was when." He looked down at the thief. "We have to."

The swordsman knew the liar was right. But aside from keeping the thief as comfortable as possible and the ship on course there was nothing they could do. The liar stayed with the thief. The swordsman and the pirate sat on either side of the helm with the thief's compass between them and stared at the place where the sea met the sky until their sight blurred and the horizon rushed up to meet them instead of the other way around. Except it wasn't the horizon, it was a bird. A really big bird and it landed in front of them, turned into a man and said,

"You are ill. I will show you the way to her."

As soon as the birdman said the word ill, the swordsman realized he was feeling pretty bad and that the pirate didn't look so hot either. He tried to ask the birdman if _her_ was the Snow Queen.

He passed out instead.

When he woke up he was on a bed in a room that wasn't going up and down. He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked around. The thief, pirate and liar were all around him, sleeping in beds just like his.

"Awake, eh?" a scratchy voice said, and the swordsman turned in the direction it'd come from.

Beneath a tall, arched window, a woman was sitting. She had a young body and an old face, and she took a drink from the bottle in her hand before grinning at the swordsman. "Best stay where you are, pup," she said. "Keschia inflammation is nothing to mess around with."

"Who're you?" said the swordsman. His head hurt, but he thought he remembered, "A bird?"

The woman grinned again. "I see you've met our local falcon," she said. "He lives with his princess but he comes to see me. I saved his life once, you see. Sometimes he even brings me things. Two days ago he brought you and your friends."

The swordsman looked beyond the woman, out the window. Outside, sandy hills stretched as far as he could see. "I guess you're not the Snow Queen," he said.

The woman cackled like a crow. "I'm a doctor," she said, "best there is." She looked hard at the swordsman. "What do you want with the Snow Queen?" she asked. "She's bad news, that one."

"She took somebody," said the swordsman. "I'm taking him back."

"Not likely," the doctor told him.

"Why not?" he asked and she laughed again.

"I didn't always live in this great sand pit," said the doctor. "On my home island it snowed the year round. We never saw spring."

"We're looking for an island like that," the swordsman said.

"Drum," said the doctor. "That's what we called it back then. The local government was a monarchy. Five years ago, the old king died and his son took the crown. The old king was a good man. His son was a pig. Two years after the old king's death a woman came to the castle and turned the son and his ministers to ice, and we were all damned glad. The problem was, once the bad guys were gone, our new queen banished her subjects."

The swordsman said, "Why?"

The doctor shrugged. "Who knows?" she said. "But people who can turn other people to ice aren't going to get much in the way of argument. So we left." The doctor took another drink and said, "The ice woman, the woman you call the Snow Queen, some people say she's evil. All I know is, she provided ships for transport and hurt no one except for the pigs at the castle. I don't know her troubles, but I think they must be great. Now," she said, "I have a favor to ask, in return for my physician's services. You're going to Drum?"

The swordsman nodded and the doctor said, "Good. You can take my reindeer with you. He's not built for sand and heat, and Drum is still his home."

It was a week before they sailed. The doctor refused to let them go before she was sure they wouldn't, "Fall sick again and get my reindeer killed." But after three days of listening to the thief argue with the doctor about everything from provisions and charts to the secret of the doctor's youthful appearance, to whether the reindeer was going with them or not, the pirate, liar and swordsman were ready to grab their navigator and sneak out in the middle of the night.

The charts and provision problems worked themselves out without much help from the doctor or the thief. The pirate made the final decision about the reindeer.

It was tiny critter with a blue nose, and didn't look much like a reindeer. The doctor said that when it was really young, the reindeer had been caught by a bored wood sprite and enchanted. The doctor said it was smarter than most men and could make itself look like a man when it wanted to. She said she'd trained it to be a doctor, just like her.

The crew didn't know what to think. So far, whenever they saw the reindeer, it was running in the other direction. Then the day before the week from hell was up, the thief went to draw water from the well and stepped on a cobra.

The reindeer stomped the snake into the ground so fast the thief didn't have time to scream, and I'll tell you, she would have. That woman has a set of lungs on her. Yeah, you guys know, I know.

So, the reindeer would have run off after the snake-stomping but the thief said, "Please don't." And the reindeer stayed because she'd asked it to, and came with her to meet the rest of the crew. Turned out, it really was a doctor, and it could change itself into seven different combinations of reindeer and man, including its original shape.

The pirate thought that was the coolest thing ever, and said so. "Come with us," he said, and the reindeer told him, very softly, "Yes."

That night the doctor got them all drunk on desert tequila. She kicked their hung-over butts out her door the next day and told them not to come back until they'd done what they'd set out to do. The swordsman stood with the reindeer on the caravel's aft deck and watched sea erase sand. "We'll go back," he told the reindeer.

The reindeer looked up at him and said, "Yes. We will."

It took them nearly a month of sailing to reach the island that had been called Drum. During that month the crew ate and slept and played and trained with each other and anyone else who attacked them first. They also found out a lot of stuff about each other, some of it good, some annoying, and some just plain weird.

The liar was a sharpshooter, he could make bombs out of anything, and he snored like a freight train.

The thief could pick any pocket, cheat at any game ever invented, and charged five hundred percent interest on IOUs.

The reindeer was as good a doctor as his mentor had claimed. He also hid the wrong way around corners and believed anything you told him, which was good since it meant the liar always had an audience.

It wasn't until they got attacked on open water by a fleet of ships led by a man with whole-body armor and a spiked cape that they learned the pirate was made of rubber. They sailed away from the wreckage of six ships, the five of them in their tiny caravel, with no worse wounds than a few deep cuts between them.

While their reindeer doctor panicked and ran around stitching and bandaging and smearing ointment all over everything, the swordsman sat down beside the pirate and said, "What the hell are you?"

"Dunno," the pirate shrugged. "My dad does storm winds and thunder to order, sometimes lightning if a long-time customer asks. Mom makes mountains explode. Dad calls 'em volcanoes. My big brother's pretty cool, too," he added. "He can turn himself into a fireball."

"Sounds cool," said the swordsman, and it did. It sounded awesome.

"Yup," said the pirate. He smacked the soles of his sandals together and looked up at the sky. "It'll be even cooler when I find him."

The swordsman couldn't argue with that. He sat silent beside the pirate and for the first time since he'd set sail from his home island, he thought about the cook. He thought about stupid pink hearts and hard-ass words and kicks that could put a man through a concrete wall. Four walls. In a row.

He remembered the way they used to sit on the back steps of the restaurant after the other cooks had gone home or to bed, and they wouldn't talk, they'd just sit there and drink wine together, while the cook smoked and the swordsman watched the smoke from the cook's cigarette spiral upwards.

He wanted the cook to be sitting next to him now. Wanted to tell him about the pirate and the thief and the liar and the reindeer, about how great they were, about all the crazy stuff they'd seen and done together. Wanted to tell the cook that he should have been there with them for all of it. Because he really should.

And the swordsman thought, So. Friends, then. And he was okay with that.

Things got quieter after that afternoon. Three days out from the fleet's destruction, the air started to change, it got colder, and the crew started spending more time in the cabins and the galley, huddled together for warmth.

"We're almost there," the reindeer said one evening, and no one answered him because he was right and they all knew it. In the morning, the crew stood side by side together against the starboard bulwark, the reindeer balanced on the swordsman's shoulders, and off in the distance they saw high, flat-topped mountains rising through heavy fog.

It was snowing when they landed.

They moored the caravel next to the Snow Queen's sleigh-shaped ship. The dock was ice-slick underfoot. At the end of the dock a lamp post stood, and under the lamp post there was a real sleigh, white with weird carvings that changed every time you looked away. A huge black bull was harnessed to the sleigh; it looked back over one heavy black shoulder at the crew, and the swordsman thought he'd never seen anyone that depressed-looking before.

"Shall we?" said the thief.

"I'm driving," said the pirate.

"No," said everyone else.

The thief steered the sleigh through thick clumps of pine trees. The pirate sulked. He sulked right up until the gates of Impel Down, and then he saw the giant rabbits with fangs guarding the gates and he said to the swordsman, "Let's go kick their asses."

The swordsman couldn't think of an answer, so he drew his swords.

A lot of beat-up bunnies later, after the pirate punched the gates down, the crew stood just inside the palace courtyard and stared.

"Who are they?" the liar squeaked.

"At a guess," said the thief, "everyone the World Government doesn't much like."

The courtyard was packed with statues carved out of ice. Row after row of blank-faced men and women stared at nothing. It was creepy as hell.

Then the pirate yelped, "It's him!" and the crew chased after him through the forest of ice people until he stopped in front of one and stood looking at it. "That's mine," said the pirate. He sat down in the snow, staring up at what was left of his brother.

"Spread out," the swordsman said harshly. "Check all of them." He didn't say that they needed to look for faces they knew. He figured they'd got that part already.

He thought it must have taken him days to walk all the way through the courtyard, looking at every statue. Or maybe minutes. He didn't know. What he did know was that the cook wasn't one of them. He ended where he'd started from, next to the pirate and the pirate's brother. "I'm going inside," he said.

The pirate turned towards him. "We'll be here," the pirate told him. "When you find him."

The swordsman nodded, but the pirate had already turned back to the statue. Wet cold landed on the swordsman's face. It was snowing again.

Inside, Impel Down was a mess of corridors bent back in on themselves and each other, rooms that got bigger once you stepped into them and doorways that didn't go anywhere. The swordsman walked down frost-bitten halls, through rooms of echoing ice. He didn't see anyone, not even ice statues, and the only thing he heard was the ice creaking beneath his boots. When he hit the end of a long hall, he looked around and thought, I was here before. At least, he thought he'd been. He felt like he'd been going around in circles for hours. And then he heard something that wasn't the ice, more like the shuffle of feet against ice, and he walked towards the sound.

The room was one of those that seemed bigger once you got inside it. The room was the biggest kitchen the swordsman had ever seen. It was made completely of ice.

Every wall was covered in cabinets with counters under and over them. In the middle of the room was an enormous table, and every inch of the table, every inch of every counter was stacked head-high and higher with dishes that sparkled like icicles. Plates and glasses and pots and pans and platters and bowls and cups and stuff the swordsman didn't even recognize, thousands, millions of them stacked on every surface.

Standing in the kitchen, his arms full of icy plates, was the cook. He was… he was putting the dishes away.

He did it slowly. Pick up two armfuls of see-through china, walk the same circuit around the table to the same cabinet, bend over the same way and slide ice dishes onto an ice shelf. Do it again. Then again after that.

The swordsman hated it. The cook never did anything the same way; not food, not wash up, hell, not even the way he lit his cigarettes. This stupid ice kitchen had frozen his brain. Things had been wrong even before the cook had left, but the swordsman thought this had to be the wrongest thing of all, and that pissed him off enough to get him moving. He stomped forward into the kitchen made of ice, and the stupid dishes rattled and shook with his footsteps.

He planted himself in the cook's path and waited for the cook to come around. The cook did and when he reached the swordsman he stopped, as if he couldn't move away from the path he'd worn.

The swordsman just looked at the cook for a second, and then he snorted his disgust and leaned forward. "Oi, snap out of it," he said, and did what he would have done on any other day the cook was being extra special annoying. He smacked him on the back of the head.

On a normal day, the cook would have tried to kick the swordsman's head in. Not today. Today the cook wasn't himself, wasn't ready to get smacked and he stumbled, his hands still full of ice plates, and went sprawling.

The plates smashed themselves to shards all over the ground. Something else hit the ice with a metallic tinkle, and then the cook was on the ground on his hands and knees, panting. He raised his head and looked up at the swordsman, and he said, "Where are we and where the hell are my cigarettes?"

The swordsman squatted down next to the cook. There was a tiny silver thing, looked almost like a metal fly, lying in the middle of the shattered plates. The swordsman stood up fast and brought his boot heel down on the silver fly, grinding it into the ice. He wasn't sure why he did it. He just knew that he had to.

When he stepped back, the bug thing was a silver smear and the cook was pushing to his feet. "Oi, dumbass," said the cook. "You go deaf or something?" He was patting his pockets and looking kind of desperate.

The swordsman pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his haramaki (yeah, they were the right brand, shut up Target-brow). The cook's lighter was in the swordsman's front pocket. He handed lighter and cigarettes to the cook and said, "I figured that'd be the first thing out of your mouth."

The cook said, "So you do have a brain," and kicked him.

They left the kitchen made of ice behind and walked through the green-white halls of Impel Down until they reached the door that led to the courtyard of statues. The rest of the crew was still there. So was the Snow Queen.

The swordsman clapped his hand over the cook's mouth before he could do something stupid and hissed, "Don't even. She's the one who brought you here, and she'll kill my nakama if I don't do something."

The cook gave the swordsman a look that said, "We're going to talk about this later, except there's going to be a lot of pain and not much talking involved."

The swordsman just grinned; he'd been waiting a long time to see one of those looks.

The pirate was standing in front of the statue of his brother, facing the Snow Queen. She was beautiful, the swordsman thought, but she didn't look real. Her eyes were dead and black, and her mouth and skin were as pale as the ice around her.

"Why have you come?" she asked the pirate.

"For my brother," he said.

"He belongs to the ice," the Snow Queen said.

The pirate crouched down, one hand on his knee, the other on his hat. "Not if I send you flying, he doesn't," he said.

"So be it," said the queen. She closed her eyes and curled her white hands around each other and whispered something, and her voice and breath froze as they left her mouth and broke against the air. All around, hands of ice were sprouting, clawing up out of the ground, out of the palace walls and the statues.

And right around then is when the thief pulled something out of her jacket that looked like a wand, pointed it at the clouds overhead and shouted, "Rain Tempo!"

The clouds burst open. Warm rain poured down over everything: the crew, the castle, the ice statues, the queen.

The crew stood silently under the curtain of water and stared at the thief. She stuck her tongue out at them. "What?" she said, "I'm a weather witch," and then several things happened at the same time.

The statue of the pirate's brother dissolved in a gush of liquid, leaving a guy with black hair and freckles lying in a puddle on the ground. All over the courtyard, the same thing was happening, ice melting into flesh and bone.

A huge crack split the air; the tallest tower had fallen. Impel Down was breaking up.

"We need to go now!" the liar shouted over the roar of the rain and the crash of toppling ice.

"Wait," said a new voice, but it wasn't new, it was the Snow Queen, only she didn't sound like she had before. Her eyes opened and they were blue, not black, her skin was flushed with color, it looked like skin should look. "Take me with you," she said, and the pirate said, "Okay."

"Are you kidding?" shrieked the thief.

"She would have killed us!" screeched the liar.

The pirate had his brother's arm over his shoulders, holding him steady. "She didn't kill him," the pirate said, and the swordsman looked at the cook and thought, Yeah.

The courtyard was full of wet, staring people. "We can't just leave them here," said the cook, "Some of them are ladies," but the queen said, "They are wanted by the World Government, there will be Marine battleships here in less than a day. Hurry." So they did.

By the time they made it back to the caravel, it had stopped raining and started snowing again. "Set sail!" the thief called.

"My ship," said the queen. "You must destroy it."

"That's fine," the thief said. "We've got a demolitions expert around here somewhere, go talk to him."

The liar's cannon balls turned the witch's ship to kindling, and the caravel sailed past the flames towards open water. For a while, the crew watched Drum Island get smaller and smaller the further away they sailed. Then, "What would my ladies like to drink?" said the cook, and everyone piled into the galley.

The reindeer skidded in behind everyone else. "Your brother's fine," he told the pirate. "A mild case of hypothermia, but I took care of that. He's sleeping now."

The pirate nodded and waved the hunk of meat in his hand at the reindeer, who walked over to the table and sat down beside the thief. "I thought you were going to stay on Drum?" she said, but the reindeer tugged on his hat and shook his head.

"I like being with you guys," he said.

The thief leaned over until her nose was almost touching the reindeer's nose and, "We like being with you, too," she said.

"Asshole, I don't like it at all when people say things like that!" shouted the reindeer.

"We should sail for the Undisclosed Continent," said the queen. "I do not know how close a watch the government keeps on me, but they will not let me go easily."

"You heard the lady," said the cook. "When a wise, beautiful woman speaks, a true gentleman owes it to both her and himself to listen."

The swordsman briefly and clearly remembered why he used to fight with the cook on a daily basis. Then he thought about those weeks of no fighting. He turned to the queen and said, "Why'd you take him?"

"He was infected," she said without hesitation. "A creature made by the government. It flies into the eye and lodges there, changing the way the victim views the world and everything in it. A few of the creatures escaped the lab of the man who created them, and it was my duty to capture anyone afflicted with one."

"Why would the government care?" asked the thief.

The queen smiled. "The World Government does not like anything to be beyond its control," she said. "Which is why they infected me and put me on Drum. Your rain washed the creature they placed in my eye away. Thank you."

"Hey, that reminds me," said the liar. "Why didn't you tell us you were a weather witch before?" The thief shrugged and said, "You never asked."

"You must be pretty dangerous if they stuck you there," the swordsman said to the queen. Because sure, the queen hadn't killed the cook, but she was still a long way from trustworthy.

The queen looked at the crew, at the questions on their faces, and suddenly she didn't look so much like a queen. She looked like a tired woman, and the old doctor's words, _don't know her troubles they must be great_, filtered through memory and settled at the front of the swordsman's thoughts.

"My mother was a scholar," the queen said, "the last person to understand the Forbidden Language. My father was an ice giant. When I was eight, the World Government sent Marines to kill him. Her, they banished to the Sky Islands. I do not know if she still lives, but the threat of her death was their power over me. It has been twenty years since I last saw her."

Until then, the pirate had been quiet, mostly because he'd been eating everything on the table. He swallowed his last mouthful and said, "Are the Sky Islands really up in the sky?"

"Yes," said the queen. "It is called the White Sea."

"Cool!" said the pirate. "Let's go there next."

The thief rolled her eyes, the cook lit a cigarette, the liar looked both terrified and excited, and the swordsman said, "So. How do we get there?"

The queen smiled and said, "Have you ever heard of the Rio Poneglyph?"

But that's a different story and you guys are… asleep. Thank fu—damn it, cook, don't sneak up on me like that.

I'm whispering because _I don't want them to wake up_. Come on, and shut up or next time you get to make up the story while I mess up your galley.

Whatever, I just want a drink.

There's plenty for tomorrow, I can drink one lousy bottle tonight if I want. Oh yeah? Thanks for nothing. You're not the one who just spent two hours talking a couple of hyperactive kids to sleep. My throat's killing me.

What? Not until tomorrow. He's with Mihawk and they had some stuff they had to… shit.

You know, go ahead and kill me now. I'm dead anyway.

No, I promised the rug-rats a giraffe box. If they don't get one, I'm dead. If they do, I'm still dead.

Come on, cook, what do you want, an engraved invite? I'm giving you a gold-plated opportunity, here. Take your best shot.


End file.
